UNDERWORLD - ABOUT FRAGMENTS OF TIME, J. EDGAR HOOVER, AND A BASEBALL

Abstract

Considering the recent critical perspectives on the fictions of the late 1990s, the paper interprets the narrative structure and the construction of the networks of time in the novel Underworld by Don DeLillo. Reviewing the dominant theoretical frames for the interpretation of history and narrative, historiographic metafiction proposed by Linda Hutcheon and the postmodern understanding of history as a collage of elements by Frederic Jameson, the paper examines the ideas of structuring the time in narrative from the perspective of now. Timeframe is thus interpreted as a sequence of present moments designed, recorded and repurposed as “future past moments” defined by the process of archive fever and the accelerated recontextualization of the ‘snapshots’, characters and historical figures. We propose that the idea of this structure is to bring light to seeing history as a series of contingencies rather than a teleological sequence with a predesigned outcome, and to emphasize the view on the past as a series of accidental nows. To illustrate these points the paper analyses the positioning in the structure of the narrative of the two key motifs of the novel, the baseball and the character of J. Edgar Hoover.